Category Archives: Stinging Nettles

I find myself in a green temperament; aggressive almost, for fresh, sharp, verdant scents that match the shooting growth and push away the winter, the comforting sloth of my recent smothering orientals and let me feel like a snake shedding its skin.

And D’Humeur Jalouse is the snake: possibly the greenest scent ever made (please tell me if you know of one that is greener);: almost painfully so at first – a serpent in the grass, the eyes of jealousy; spiked, strident tones of malicious stinging nettles and grasses, softened, only barely, with a sinuous touch of barely detectable almond milk to temper a rather curious, olfactory sketch that is bitter, unusual, and solitary: green to the point of catharsis.

A movement from the river bank under the shades of weeping willows- a swan glides slowly by…..

Evoking a green riverside garden, the shadows of plants rippling the waters, L’Ombre Dans L’Eau (Diptyque’s most iconic perfume?) is at first intensely green – a sharp, rush of galbanum resins entwined quite cleverly with the lush, tanging tartness of blackcurrant leaves, but from this compacted flourish there then emerges, unhurriedly, the quiet, more melancholic dignity of the Bulgarian rose: calm, romantic, yet austere, rather supercilious and snobbish even, and thus, the main theme of L’Ombre Dans L’Eau (‘the shadow in the water’) is set.

As light fades, and the murmurs of evening approach, a soft base note of pot pourri-like rose, with the slightest hint of something like peachstone, finishes off a singular, enduring composition that breathes an air of familiar timelessness.

Eau De Campagne

The perfect green?

This classic scent from 1974 is thesummer; the exhilaration of meadows; of stalks crushed underfoot, swords of sunlight infiltrating blades of grass.